Varun Sampath Computer Engineer

Current

System Software Engineer - NVIDIA

I work on firmware and display technologies for NVIDIA graphics products, including Maxwell.

Prior Work

Pacemaker Verification System - Penn ESE Senior Design

Shilpa Sarode, Sriram Radhakrishnan,
and I in conjunction with mLAB at Penn have developed a
hardware platform for closed-loop pacemaker testing. With our
system, we can capture interactions and errors that typical static
input testing systems cannot detect.

See the project page for more
info, pictures, and soon video on the system. We were fortunate to win
the school-wide senior design competition for this project, and we
hope to keep pushing it to new heights.

TA - CIS 565 at Penn

I worked as a Teaching Assistant for CIS 565 at Penn during the Spring 2012 semester. Below are links to PDFs of some of the lectures I gave:

enunciate.me

enunciate.me is a web app designed to avoid those awkward moments where you can't pronounce a contact's name or nobody can seem to pronounce yours. It allows anyone to save a recording of their name using either speech-to-text or their own voice. The generated pronounciation page can then be posted to Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else. Kevin Conley, Casey Conley, and I built it in 40 hours for PennApps Spring 2012.

μWave

μWave is a microwave that tweets, texts, and plays YouTube videos to entertain you while it cooks your delicious meal. Kevin Conley, Ben Shyong, Teddy Zhang, and I built it in 40 hours for PennApps Fall 2011, and we were lucky enough to win the Grand Prize. Check out our demo, code, and a description of how it works at uwaved.com. This project happened to get some press too. Here are a few articles on it:

SEPTANow

SEPTANow is a webapp that displays the current location of the regional rail lines on Google Maps for the Philadelphia Transit Authority SEPTA. Kevin Conley, Ben Shyong, Teddy Zhang, and I built it in 48 hours for PennApps Fall 2010, and we were proud to receive the Student Choice Award for our work. Check it out at septanow.org.

Faceblock

Faceblock is a Facebook blocker app for your Windows PC. I made it just as a cool way to learn Windows dev tools over a lonely weekend in 2010, but it has ended up useful for a finals period or two. I've recently moved the code to GitHub, and you're welcome to try out the program, available for download here.

AU-Proteus

I participated in the AU-Proteus project as part of a NSF REU program at Auburn University in 2010. We investigated the performance of ZigBee wireless mesh networks with unmanned aerial vehicles. My old project page is available here.

RAC Mustang

The remote accelerometer-controlled Mustang is a project Teddy Zhang and I worked on for ESE 350 back in Spring 2010. It uses a Freescale HCS12 to drive the servo and DC motors, along with a FireFly wireless sensor node for wireless communication and PING sensors for collision avoidance. Check out the project blog here.